Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/299

Rh the children of Lady Cholmondeley. While there he was thrown iato the company of some enthusiastic Puritans, tvhose views he quickly adopted. He resolved upon enter ing the church, and, going up to London, obtained ordination from an Irish bishop. He vas afterwards appointed to the small curacy of Whitmore, hear Stoke, in Staffordshire, and here he passed the remainder of his life, eking out his miserable stipend by teaching a small school. The most popular of his numerous works was the Short Treatise, containing all the Principal Grounds of Christian Religion, which has passed through a great many editions, and has been in common use as a Puritan catechism. His Treatise of Faith, and Friendly Trial of the Grounds tending to Separation, the latter of which defines his position with regard to the church, are also valuable works.  BALLADS. The word ballad is derived from the Old French bailer, to dance, and originally meant a song sung to the rhythmic movement of a dancing chorufc. Later, the word became the technical term for a particular form of old fashioned French poetry, remarkable for its involved and recurring rhymes. &quot; Laisse moi aux Jeux Floraux de Toulouse toutes ces vieux poesies Francoises comme ballades,&quot; says Joachim du Bellay in 1550; and Philaminte, the lady pedant of Moliere s Feinmes Scavantes, observes— &quot; La ballade, Ji mon gout, est une chose fade, Ce n en est plus la mode, elle sent son vieux temps.&quot; In England the term has usually been applied to any simple tale, told in simple verse, though attempts have been made to confine it to the subject of this paper, namely, Popular Songs. By popular songs we understand what the Germans call Volks-lieder, that is, songs composed by the people, for the people, handed down by oral tradition, and in style, taste, and even incident, common to the people in all European countries. The beauty of these purely popular ballads, their directness and freshness, has made them admired even by the artificial critics of the most artificial periods in literature. Thus Sir Philip Sydney confesses that the ballad of Chevy Chase, when chanted by &quot; a blind crowder,&quot; stirred his blood like the sound of trumpet. Addison devoted two articles in the Spectator to a critique of the same poem. Montaigne praised the naivete of the village carols ; and Malherbe preferred a rustic rhansonette to all the poems of Ronsard. These, however, are rare instances of the taste for popular poetry, and though the Danish ballads were collected and printed in the middle of the 16th century, and some Scotch collections date from the beginning of the 18th, it was .not till the publication of Allan Ramsay s Evergreen and Tea Table Miscellany, and of Bishop Percy s Reliques, that a serious effort was made to recover Scotch and English folk-songs from the recitation of the old people who still knew them by heart. At the time when Percy was editing the Reliques, Madame de Chenier, the mother of the celebrated French poet of that name, composed an essay on the ballads of her native land, modern Greece ; and later, Herder and Grimm and Goethe, in Germany, did for the songs of their country what Scott did for those of Liddesdale and the Forest. It was fortunate, perhaps, for poetry, though unlucky for the scientific study of the ballads, that they were mainly regarded from the literary point of view. The influence of their artless melody and straightforward diction may be felt in the lyrics of Goethe and of Coleridge, of Wordsworth, of Heine, and of Andre&quot; Chenier. Chenier, in the most affected age even of French poetry, translated some of the Romaic ballads ; one, as it chanced, being identical with that which Shakspeare borrowed from some English reciter, and put into the mouth of the mad Ophelia. The beauty of the ballads and the interest they excited led to numerous forgeries. It is probable that Hogg was as great a culprit in Scotland as Prosper Me rime e with his Guda, or collec tion of Servian imitations, in France. Editors could not resist the temptation to interpolate, to restore, and to improve the fragments that came in their way. The Marquis de la Villemarque, who first drew attention to the ballads of Brittany, is not wholly free from this fault. Thus a very general scepticism was awakened, and when questions came to be asked as to the date and authorship of the Scottish traditional ballads, it is scarcely to be wondered at that Dr Chambers attributed most of them to the accomplished Lady Wardlaw, who lived in the middle of the 18th century. The vexed and dull controversy as to the origin of Scottish folk-songs was due to ignorance of the comparative method, and of the ballad literature of Europe in general. The result of the discussion was to leave a vague impression that our native ballads were perhaps as old as the time of D unbar, and were the production of a class of professional minstrels. These minstrels are a stumbling-block in the way of the student of the growth of ballads. The domestic annals of Scotland show that her kings used to keep court- bards, and also that strollers, jongleurs, as they were called, went about singing at the doors of farm-houses and in the O O streets of towns. Here were two sets of minstrels who had apparently left no poetry ; and, on the other side, there was a number of ballads that claimed no author. It was the easiest and most satisfactory inference that the courtly minstrels made the verses, which the wandering crowders imitated or corrupted. But this theory fails to account, among other things, for the universal sameness of tone, of incident, of legend, of primitive poetical formulae, which the Scotch ballad possesses, in common with the ballads of Greece, of France, of Provence, of Portugal, of Denmark, and of Italy. The object, therefore, of this article is to prove that what has long been acknowledged of nursery tales, of what the Germans call Marchen, namely, that they are the immemorial inheritance at least of all European peoples, is true also of ballads. The main incidents and plots of the fairy tales of Celts, and Germans, and Slavonic and Indian peoples, their unknown antiquity and mysterious origin, are universally recognised. No one any longer attributes them to this or that author, or to this or that date. The attempt to find date or author for a genuine popular song is as futile as a similar search in the case of a Marchen. It is to be asked, then, whether what is confessedly true of folk-tales, of such stories as the Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, is true also of folk-songs. Are they, or have they been, as universally sung as the fairy tales have been narrated ] Do they, too, bear traces of the survival of primitive creeds and primitive forms of consciousness and of imagination 1 Are they, like Marchen, for the most part, little influenced by the higher religions, Christian or poly theistic 1 ? Do they turn, as Marchen do, on the same incidents, repeat the same stories, employ the same ma chinery of talking birds and beasts *? Lastly, are any specimens of ballad literature capable of being traced back to extreme antiquity 1 It appears that all these questions may be answered in the affirmative ; that the great age and universal diffusion of the ballad may be proved ; and that its birth, from the lips and heart of the people, may be contrasted with the origin of an artistic poetry in the demand of an aristocracy for a separate epic literature, destined to be its own possession, and to be the first development of a poetry of personality, a record of indi vidual passions and emotions. After bringing forward examples of the identity of features in European ballad poetry, we shall proceed to show that they all sprang from the same primitive custom of dance, accompanied by improvised song, which still exists in Greece and Russia, and even in valleys of the Pyrenees. There can scarcely be a better guide in the examination 